Bored and Brilliant challenge 3: making memories
Previous posts on the challenge:
Tuesday
I had another day without using my phone in transit. I didn’t feel any particular urge to use it or feel that I was missing anything. My biggest fear is that I will forget my Duolingo lessons and lose my 666 day streak!
I sat up the back of the bus today and didn’t think about anything much. Actually, I was mostly focusing on the challenge and what I’d write today and how I was going to get through the myriad of posts that are sitting on my computer from this challenge and my 19 for 2019 updates. What a dilemma to have!
That made me think of the word “myriad” and how in Australia we say “a myriad of [whatevers]” but in America they leave out the “of”. I wondered why this was. And then I wondered why we say “a dozen eggs” but “a pair of jeans”. “A thousand nights” but a “couple of days”.
Why?
Challenge 3: Photo-free day
This challenge considers how many photos are taken every day (10 billion a month in America, according to the book, 75 per cent of which are taken on a phone) and uploaded to social media (depending on your source it could be anywhere from 50 million to 100 million a day just to Instagram). It suggests we spend more time trying to capture the moment than we do living in it and experiencing it.
The challenge asks us to put the camera down for a day and see the world through our eyes, not through our screens.
The book reports that people who did this reported that they took pictures way more, and more mindlessly, than they had thought they did before they did the challenge.
I know this is something I do a lot. I try to download my day’s photos at the end of every day and often wonder what I’m ever going to do with a lot of them.
I noticed on Monday that I took very few photos by not using my phone in transit. This is because I take most of my photos in transit. I take photos of street corners as I’m walking past for my Hobart Street Corners project and I take photos of things that grab my attention for Straightlinesgirl, in particular, my exploration of Hobart’s architecture. I often wander to work by different routes to find new things or walk by my favourite places to photograph them in a different light or from a different angle.
Transit time is walking time is my creative time. So if I don’t use my phone in transit, there is very little I will take photos of. Keeping the phone in my bag meant that it wasn’t easy to access if I came across something I would normally take a photo of for later reference or to post to Instagram or my blog, or to share with a friend.
There’s really only a couple of things I would normally take photos of outside my transit time, so the real challenge was just to forget to do that today. And it wasn’t that hard.
The only thing I wouldn’t compromise on is that I take a snippet of video every day for my One Second Everyday project, which becomes a 365-second mashup of my year at the end of each year. But a video isn’t a photo is it . . . . ?
I think what I want to do as a result of this is to be more mindful of what I take photos of and why. For example, last year in the street corners project, I would take a photo of any old street corner and post it. This year, since setting up a separate account for it, I have started to become a bit more strategic in how often I post and what I post, to create a more cohesive collection of photos rather than posting whatever, wherever, whenever. I still have more work to do but I’ve made a start.
I survived the day without taking any photos. It wasn’t difficult at all but the book warns you that, if you thought this was easy, the tough day is coming . . .
About The Author
